“Pushing people?”
Ricardo laughs and nods. “Yes,” he says. “Colombians do a lot of pushing. It upsets Europeans.”
I nod. “Yeah,” I say crossing to the window. “Don’t try it in England.”
“Anyway, my mother,” he says, joining me at my side. “She’s not good. She has Alzheimer’s. My sister says she is getting bad very quickly now. She has whole days when she doesn’t recognise anyone.” I note that he replies without hesitation.
A gust of wind blows the rain against the window making the interior feel somehow even cosier. “Can’t your sister look after her?” I ask. “I mean, if she’s already there?”
Ricardo laughs. “Maria Clara? She can hardly look after herself! Anyway, mother hates her. She was saying this morning that her bad days are the only good days, the only days she can get near her.”
“Because she doesn’t recognise her?”
“Exactly,” Ricardo says.
“Will you live with her then? Your mother?”
“Yes,” Ricardo says. “To start with anyway. Maybe later if she is really bad she will go to a hospice. But to start with, yes, that is the idea. And houses are very expensive in Bogotá. Her apartment is very big, so …”
I sip my drink. “They’re expensive?” I say. “I’m surprised at that.”
“Very,” Ricardo says.
“I would have thought they’d be cheaper, its being a … developing country.” I nearly said third-world. I realise I have made a lucky escape.
Ricardo laughs. “It’s more expensive than Nice,” he says. “Colombia is not like people think. Colombia is not Africa you know. Bogotá is like Paris or Madrid, only maybe a bit more dangerous. And more fun.”
“I never went to Latin America,” I say. “Well, except for a really awful holiday to Cuba.”
“You went to Cuba?” Ricardo says, apparently impressed.
I nod. “It was terrible. I broke up with a boyfriend there. Plus it was Club Med,” I admit shamefully.
“Mon dieu!” Ricardo exclaims. “Quelle horreur ! Varadero?”
I nod. “Yes, Varadero.”
“You don’t go to Havana?” Ricardo says. He pronounces it, Habana.
“Yes, I did,” I say. “It was beautiful. But falling apart. Very poor. Soldiers with machine guns everywhere. I can’t say I found any of it particularly relaxing.”
Ricardo wrinkles his nose. “Yes,” he says. “Not such a good regime in Cuba. In Colombia we have a democracy since, well, since independence really. Well, almost. Except for Bolivar and Rojas Pinilla.”
And so, as we sip our drinks and look out at the boats bobbing in the port, Ricardo tells me more about Colombia. He’s not jingoistic, but he does love his country, and his face is a pleasure to look at as he wistfully describes the mountains around Bogotá and the tierra caliente (the hot lands) below.
When I finish my drink, he puts his own down and phones downstairs to a restaurant. As he orders two vegetarian pizzas I watch the circling beam from the lighthouse as it sweeps round and around. “The view here really is extraordinarily beautiful,” I say. “Will you keep the place? You own it, right?”
Ricardo places the phone back in the charger and returns to my side. “Yes,” he says. “I will rent it out. I have contact in agency. They will do everything. And it will continue to pay the … prêt immobilier.”
“The mortgage,” I say.
Ricardo cocks an ear at me, so I repeat it more slowly. “A mort-gage,” I say again. “It’s just for houses. For a car or anything else it’s a loan. For a house it’s a mortgage.”
He nods. “OK, mortgage,” he says, then with a frown. “Strange word.”
“I think it’s because you’re in gage with it until you die,” I explain. “A mort gage. Anyway, it’s a good investment. I think you’re right to keep the place.”
Ricardo nods. “Yes, and when my mother is dead, maybe I’ll come back a bit.”
I grimace. “You sound very matter of fact about it. About your mother.”
Ricardo nods. “Well it is life. And I am a doctor, so … She will probably be gone in less than two years. Her sister went very quickly.”
“Alzheimer’s as well?” I ask.
Ricardo nods. “She died two years ago. They have to tie her to bed in the end.”
“They tied her to the bed?”
Ricardo laughs, genuinely it seems, at the memory. “Yes,” he says. “In the hospice. She was biting everyone …” he raps his head. “Nothing left up there at all; my sister said she was like a mobile without the sim card.”
I smirk despite myself. “Ouch,” I say. “But she’s not the only reason is she? You seem happy to go home anyway.”
Ricardo exhales through his nose and grins at me. “Oh yes,” he says. “It is a wonderful country. And it changes so fast. Not like Europe. Much faster. I like this. New buildings, new bars, new laws. We even have gay marriage now,” he says. “Not bad for a Catholic country.”
I nod. “Not bad indeed,” I say.
Once the pizzas arrive we put the open boxes on the coffee table and sit facing each other, lifting the greasy slices with our fingers.
“You must come one day,” Ricardo says. “An amazing country.”
I finish my mouthful. “Sure,” I say. “But there are lots of amazing countries I have to visit. If it didn’t cost so much I would visit them all.”
“I know,” Ricardo says. “But Colombia is special. Everyone who go there says so.”
“And I don’t speak Spanish,” I say.
Ricardo laughs. “No one in Colombia speaks any other language,” he says. “So you must learn Spanish.”
I nod. “You see,” I say. “Not so easy.”
Ricardo nods. “If things were different,” he says. “I would say come with me.”
I smile at him. “That’s sweet,” I say. “But with the gîte and everything – well, I don’t think there will be any holidays for years.”
“No,” Ricardo agrees, lifting a slice of the droopy pizza to his mouth. “That’s why I say, if things were different. No gîte, no Tom, no Jenny. It would make me happy that you would come.”
I look up from the pizza and catch him staring at me intensely, and in those deep dark eyes, I catch a glimpse of something sad, something meaningful. I wonder if I haven’t missed something here.
“Well, I’m very jealous,” I say, trying to lighten the tone. “A whole new life!”
Ricardo nods. “In a way it is also my old life. But things have changed so much.”
I nod and tear off another mouthful of pizza, and Ricardo stares at me as I eat it. Something passes between us in that moment, and I realise that we are going to sleep together again. It’s obvious and unavoidable. For some reason, it’s natural.
“You will stay tonight?” Ricardo asks, apparently on the same wavelength.
I shake my head sadly. “I can’t,” I say. “I’m supposed to be visiting a friend. A friend who doesn’t exist.”
Ricardo nods. “When I wake … waked?”
“When I wake up,” I say. “Or when I woke up – if it’s the past.”
“When I woke up with you,” Ricardo says uncertainly. “It make me very happy.”
I grin broadly and feel my cheeks tingle. “That’s very sweet,” I say. “But I can’t.”
Ricardo nods. “But you will stay for a while,” he says.
I smile. “What can I say? You lit candles!”
Ricardo laughs at this and pats the sofa beside him. “Come here,” he says. “If we don’t have long, then come here.”
The patting gesture unnerves me a little. It’s the same one I make when I want Paloma to join me. But as obediently as Paloma, in fact, considerably more obediently than Paloma, I stand and move around the table and take a seat beside him. He slips an arm behind my back and it feels perfectly normal, perfectly natural, as if I have not a double-life, but two lives – two entirely independent lives which are in no cont
radiction whatsoever.
Ricardo’s interphone buzzes again. It sounds like a wasp in a biscuit tin and it’s loud enough to make me start. Ricardo glances around the room and stands.
“Maybe the pizza boy again,” he says. “He forget something perhaps?”
But when he returns to the room his face looks slightly crazed. “C’est Jenny,” he says, quietly.
“Jenny?” I repeat.
“Elle monte,” he says. – “She’s on her way up.”
Squashed against the wall, the gently falling rain wets only my legs – the overhang of the roof is protecting my head and upper body. My heart is racing and it seems to me, in this instant, on Ricardo’s tiny balcony, that in the last thirty confused seconds, we have – perhaps influenced by too many dodgy sitcoms – made a bad decision.
The window beside me thuds as Ricardo’s front-door opens and then closes again. I listen to the vague sound of voices from the room beyond, and wonder about the alternatives – telling Jenny that my friend Tony wasn’t in; that I bumped into Ricardo … that would have been the best bet. It might have seemed suspicious, but that suspicion fades into insignificance when compared with what will happen if Jenny leans against the window and sees me hiding here.
Suddenly, Jenny’s voice is mere inches from my right shoulder. “Well that’s what I thought,” she says. Her voice is clear enough that she might as well be talking to me. “That’s why I …” she continues. As she turns back into the room her voice becomes indistinct again.
I force myself to breathe.
One floor down to my left, someone else’s windows open with a thud. A woman reaches out and pulls her shutters closed, making me aware of the hundreds of windows around the port overlooking this spot. I wonder if someone, somewhere is watching, laughing even at this two-bit farce.
I hear Ricardo’s voice, and then the window vibrates again twice in short succession, and then there is silence.
I turn my head to the right and compose my features into a crazed expression of stunned relief and wait for Ricardo to appear and laugh at me. But nothing happens, no one comes.
The rain lessens, then abruptly intensifies. I watch the minute hand on the church clock move astoundingly slowly around the dial. I wonder if it’s safe to go back in. Have they both left? Or are they having sex on the couch? I lean forward just enough to see that the lights are out. I twist and peer into the darkened room. I can make out the sofa, the dark doorway to the kitchen … As I imagine Jenny’s face appearing mere millimetres from my own on the other side of the pane my heart starts to race again.
And then with the thought, “Oh, this is ridiculous!” – in a moment of fuzzy, crazy, risqué logic I’m ready to take whatever the consequences are. I push on the window and step boldly back into the lounge. I stand dripping for a moment, unsure what to do. There is only one way in or out of the building, so if I try to leave and they are standing outside the front door chatting – that would be a catastrophe. Then again, perhaps Ricardo has invented an excuse – something they must nip out to get. Perhaps he’s counting on me slipping away quickly. If I stay and they come back I could always go back to the balcony. I look at the puddle of water on the floor, and realise that that isn’t going to wash.
Just as I cross to the front door and press my ear against it, my phone rings making me jump out of my skin. It crosses my mind that in a real sitcom it would have rung while I was out on the balcony, forcing me to lob it into the sea. I pull it from my pocket and answer.
“I’ll be back in one minute,” Ricardo says breathlessly. “Don’t move.”
When I hear Ricardo’s steps and voice approaching I start to panic anew. But then it’s too late to do anything – his key is in the door, and it’s opening and then he’s standing before me winking and talking into his phone, doctor talk apparently – “Tout à fait, dix milligrammes.” I gasp in relief and Ricardo frowns at me and then ends his conversation. “À vendredi,” he says. “Oui, vendredi matin.” He clicks his phone off and crosses the room smiling. “You got very wet huh?” he says, pulling his own glistening coat off.
I shake my head. “Crazy!” I say. “I was out there ages. I didn’t know if you had gone or if you were still here.”
Ricardo shakes his head. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I switched the lights … I say to Jenny very loudly I will walk her home. You could not hear?”
I shake my head. “The only thing I heard was Jenny when she came to the window.”
“I know,” Ricardo says. “Very close … I was shaking.”
“What the fuck was she doing here?” I ask.
“She saw someone at the window,” he says. “So she thinks I’m in. Only I tell her I am working, so …”
“Shit!” I say. “What did you say?”
Ricardo shrugs. “That yes, I am working. I’m allowed home for pizza, you know? And then I say I have a home visit on Place Garibaldi. So I walk her home.”
“Did she notice the two pizza boxes?” I ask.
Ricardo shrugs. “I don’t care,” he says. “If she say something I tell her it’s buy one get one free.”
“And that you were very hungry.”
Ricardo shrugs again. “Come here,” he says opening his arms. “I’m sorry. That was horrible.”
I step towards him and blow through my lips. “Yeah,” I say. “That was pretty bad.”
He wraps his arms around me. “You are soaked,” he says, leaning back far enough to focus. “You must get these off.”
“I think I should go home,” I say.
“No,” he says. “You must take them off. It’s OK …”
“Don’t say it,” I laugh. “Please don’t say that.”
“What?” Ricardo asks, frowning.
“Please don’t say, ‘it’s OK, I’m a doctor.’”
He leans back and frowns at me as if I am being particularly strange. “Why would I say that?” he asks.
I roll my eyes. “Never mind,” I say. “Lost in translation.”
“A very good film,” he says. “But take these off please. We can put them to dry on the radiator.”
I pull off my shoes, socks and jeans, and we distribute them on the three small radiators, then Ricardo hugs me again.
“That was terrible,” I say again. “I mean, that was really bad.”
“Yes,” he agrees.
“I shouldn’t have come,” I say.
“No,” he agrees again.
“I can’t do this shit - I’m just not made that way.”
He turns and pulls the cushions from the sofa. “No,” he says. “I agree.”
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Preparing the bed,” he says, throwing a cushion at me. “Here, help me.”
Three Letters
As the days go by I start to wonder – perhaps a little melodramatically – if I’m not having some kind of breakdown. My thoughts about Ricardo swing violently from the desire to see (and sleep) with him again – to make the most of him before he vanishes – and wanting to close the whole crazy episode once and for all. It’s almost as if my doubts about Tom, about the gîte are somehow merely Ricardo’s fault; as if once he vanishes everything will be simple again; a simple ad break beyond which the film will resume as if it had never been interrupted.
Ricardo appears to be suffering from a similar syndrome – his attempts to see me are few and far between – but when they happen, they are desperate and pleading. “Please,” he says. “In a few weeks I am gone. In a few weeks you never see me again.” Occasionally, too, when his pleas coincide with my own phase of wanting, they are convincing as well, so over the next three weeks I see him precisely three times; we have sex, or perhaps I should say, make love, precisely three times too. I say make love because as we orgasm together I can see something deep and warm and longing in his eyes, and I know what that thing is because I can feel it behind my own. And because, afterwards, tearing myself away from him is like pulling a tooth.
; Tom hangs around the apartment, nervously waiting for me to announce a decision on the gîte; too nervous to ask or in fact mention the project in any way. I don’t bring it up either because I don’t have an answer. When I’m missing Ricardo, when I’m hoping he’ll phone, or scheming when I might get away to see him again, the gîte is clearly a stupid futile fantasy – in fact the most absurd fantasy I have ever indulged in, and at these times I wonder how I ever got this close to doing it; but when I’m yearning for Ricardo to leave, waiting for that blip on the radar of my life to finally start fading, it feels obvious, inevitable – Tom and the gîte feel like destiny.
There’s a tiny detached part of my brain which seems able to oversee the two thought processes, seemingly so distinct that I wonder if each doesn’t come from a separate hemisphere. The overseer analyses the whole thing with calm logic and announces that the end result will depend not on choice, but on timing, chance, call it what you will. It says that if I’m forced to decide before Ricardo leaves then I will be too doubtful to say, ‘yes,’ that I won’t be able to do anything except say, ‘no.’ But if Ricardo leaves first there will be a life to be resumed and a void to be filled; a void that might only be filled with a ‘yes.’
In the meantime the decision tortures my existence, disturbing my dreams with sweaty unremembered nightmares and shortening my sleep with bursts of five a.m. insomnia. The dilemma obsesses my brain to the point that I’m unable to follow a film on TV or read a newspaper, let alone read a book. Hell, I can’t even seem to remember that there is cheese on toast under the grill, or a tea bag stewing in a cup.
These lapses of sanity provoke worried glances from Tom and a gentle, almost parental taking over of the daily tasks. But he never comments, as if he somehow understands why I’m like this, and at times I wonder if he hasn’t in fact understood everything. I wonder if he doesn’t secretly know that time is on his side, that all he has to do is sit it out.
And then it happens, and like all truly good things, and all truly bad things, it is unpredictable and sudden.
Tom, returning from babysitting for Jenny, tells me that he thinks she’s depressed. “Now Ricardo’s fixed a date I think it has really hit her,” he tells me.
Better Than Easy Page 21
